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The Chosen By Reuven Analysis

Decent Essays

In The Chosen, Reuven and his community have to consider two very important things during the time they live: how they can stay loyal to their country, and how they can stay loyal to their religion. Living in the United States during World War 2, Reuven’s community was desperate to prove their loyalty to America; to prove that although they were Jewish, they were just as American as anyone else. One way they did this was through baseball. At the time, baseball was one of the most popular sports in America, and proving your skill as a baseball player, and as an athlete in general, would show that you bought into American values, proving that you were truly American. Reuven explains that, “America’s entry into the Second World War” led “English teachers in the Jewish parochial schools [to use baseball] to show the gentile world that yeshiva students were as physically fit…as any other American student” (5). While Reuven and his community were focused on proving their Americanism to the entire country, they were also having to prove their loyalty to the smaller community where they lived. When Reuven and his team didn’t practice the Jewish religion in a certain way, other more zealous Jewish groups would accuse them of not being Jewish enough. What bothered Reuven the most about this was the more extreme groups’ “fanatic sense of righteousness, their absolute certainty that they and they alone had God’s ear, and every other Jew was wrong, totally wrong, a sinner, a hypocrite, an apikoros, and doomed, therefore, to burn in hell” (24).

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